Tipping is a phenomenon that illustrates the importance of social norms and psychological reasons in motivating economic behavior. People tip because this is the social norm and disobeying norms results in psychological disutility. Tipping is also economically important: in the United States...

The paper presents a model of the evolution of social norms. When a norm is costly to follow and people do not derive benefits from following it except for avoiding social disapproval, the norm erodes over time. Tip percentages, however, increased over the years, suggesting that people derive...

Institutions can affect individual behavior both via their efficiency impact and via their risk reducing mechanisms. However there has been little study of the relative importance of these two channels in how individuals choose between simultaneously extant institutions. This paper presents a...